arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Rainer Löwen.
We show that a simply connected stable plane with connected lines is isomorphic to an open subplane of a classical projective plane (i.e., a plane over the real or complex numbers, the quaternions or the octonions) if it has that property locally. We also give several examples indicating that our hypotheses cannot be relaxed much further.
We describe the development of the mathematics of Helmut R. Salzmann (3. 11. 1930 -- 8. 3. 2022) and the main difficulties he was facing, documenting his lifelong productivity and his far reaching influence. We include a comprehensive bibliography of his work.
A locally compact stable plane of positive topological dimension will be called semiaffine if for every line $L$ and every point $p$ not in $L$ there is at most one line passing through $p$ and disjoint from $L$. We show that then the plane is either an affine or projective plane or a punctured projective plane (i.e., a projective plane with one point deleted). We also compare this with the situation in general linear spaces (without topology), where P. Dembowski showed that the analogue of our main result is true for finite spaces but fails in general.
Using the Klein correspondence, regular parallelisms of PG(3,R) have been described by Betten and Riesinger in terms of a dual object, called a hyperflock determining (hfd) line set. In the special case where this set has a span of dimension 3, a second dualization leads to a more convenient object, called a generalized star of lines. Both constructions have later been simplified by the author. Here we refine our simplified approach in order to obtain similar results for regular parallelisms of oriented lines. As a consequence, we can demonstrate that for oriented parallelisms, as we call them, there are distinctly more possibilities than in the non-oriented case. The proofs require a thorough analysis of orientation in projective spaces (as manifolds and as lattices) and in projective planes and, in particular, in translation planes. This is used in order to handle continuous families of oriented regular spreads in terms of the Klein model of PG(3,R). This turns out to be quite subtle. Even the definition of suitable classes of dual objects modeling oriented parallelisms is not so obvious.
A regular parallelism of real projective 3-space PG(3,R) is an equivalence relation on the line space such that every class is equivalent to the set of 1-dimensional complex subspaces of a 2-dimensional complex vector space. We shall assume that the set of classes is compact, and characterize those regular parallelisms that admit an action of a 2-dimensional torus group. We prove that there is a one-dimensional subtorus fixing every parallel class. From this property alone we deduce that the parallelism is a 2- or 3-dimensional regular parallelism in the sense of Betten and Riesinger. If a 2-torus acts, then the parallelism can be described using a so-called generalized line star which admits a 1-torus action. We also study examples of such parallelisms by constructing generalized line stars. In particular, we prove a claim which was presented by Betten and Riesinger with an incorrect proof. The present article continues a series of papers by the first author on parallelisms with large groups.
Betten and Riesinger constructed Parallelisms of $\mathop{\rm PG}(3,\mathbb R)$ with automorphism group $\mathop{\rm SO}(3,\mathbb R)$ by applying the reducible $\mathop{\rm SO}(3,\mathbb R)$-action to a rotational Betten spread. This was generalized by the present author so as to include oriented parallelisms (i.e., parallelisms of oriented lines). In this way, a much larger class of examples was produced. Here we show that, apart from Clifford parallelism, these are the only topological parallelisms admitting an automorphism group of dimension 3 or larger. In particular, we show that a topological parallelism admitting the irreducible action of $\mathop{\rm SO}(3,\mathbb R)$ is Clifford.
We introduce topological parallelisms of oriented lines (briefly called oriented parallelisms). Every topological parallelism (of lines) on PG(3,R) gives rise to a parallelism of oriented lines, but we show that even the most homogeneous parallelisms of oriented lines other than the Clifford parallelism do not necessarily arise in this way. In fact we determine all parallelisms of both types that admit a reducible SO(3)-action. Only the Clifford parallelism admits a larger group Surprisingly, it turns out that there are far more oriented parallelisms of this kind than ordinary parallelisms. In particular, we show that the SO(3)-invariant ordinary parallelisms constructed by Betten and Riesinger are the only ones compatible with this group action. We also study the rotational Betten spreads used in this construction and their automorphisms. The automorphism group of the (oriented) parallelisms is always SO(3), no matter how large the automorphism group of the non-regular spread is. There are far more isomorphism types of parallelisms than types of spreads.
Betten and Riesinger have shown that Clifford parallelism on real projective space is the only topological parallelism that is left invariant by a group of dimension at least 5. We improve the bound to 4. Examples of different parallelisms admitting a group of dimension 3 are known, so 3 is the "critical dimension".
We conjecture that the automorphism group of a topological parallelism on real projective 3-space is compact. We prove that at least the identity component of this group is, indeed, compact.
We investigate under which conditions a rectangular table can be placed with all four feet touching a continuous ground by turning it on the spot.